Diffused cultural events and urban regeneration. Milan piano city

During the past decades, culture plays a more and more important role in guiding the comprehensive urban regeneration. Festivals and events as a specific form of culture, draws people’s attention. Cities are eager to become eventful in order to win out in the global competition. Studies had been conducted for digging out the mechanism of events, especially the mega and major ones, but for the smaller scaled event, there remains a blank. Thus, this thesis develops an in-depth study of diffused cultural events and their impacts on urban regeneration, filling the blank left by the studies of events. It firstly shed light on how cultural policy and cultural events could help with urban regeneration, especially from the social point of view. And then contributes to the event profile with a new concept of ‘Diffused cultural event’. Then the study explores the possible mechanism of diffused cultural events based on the study of urban issues and the prevailing urban strategies, namely the creative city, entrepreneurial city, and community capacity building. Thirdly, it examines the theories proposed in the previous part with a case study of Milan Piano City, both at the level of city and the venues.